New York City is a real transit hub for the whole world.
Today, 40% of New Yorkers were born in another country.
Because we live in such a global world, we consider the next epidemic an inevitably.
It's not a matter of whether, it's a matter of when.
The Tenement Museum is fundamentally at its core a museum
about immigration and migration history.
And so, what we really try to do is use the stories of immigrants and migrants who lived
in the tenements we today interpret as a museum
to foster a kind of sense of empathy in our visitors
as a way of engaging them in a discussion about the role of immigration in American life.
John and Caroline Schneider, both of whom were German-speaking immigrants,
who lived at 97 Orchard Street in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s,
ran a German lager beer saloon in the basement storefront space of the building.
At the same time, they were living with and suffering from tuberculosis.
This chronic endemic disease – what was that like, in what was essentially a 24-hour business?
Ultimately, Caroline Schneider passes away in 1885.
Her tombstone is really sort of beautiful and stands out among, not only the family
burial plot, but the entire cemetery.
We used to have thousands of cases of TB a year.
We're now down to about 600 a year,
and for the first time last year we had an uptick.
So we are reminded that you can never stop being prepared.
The Burinescu family were Romanian Jewish immigrants
who lived at 97 Orchard Street really from the 19-teens up through the early 1930s.
Most of what we know about Jacob Burinescu's story and his experience
with the flu pandemic of 1918,
having died from that terrible infection,
comes from his daughter, Jacqueline, who was not yet born when he passed away.
He became ill while caring for some friends of his who had become stricken with the flu.
The idea that you were inhabiting this small space with somebody who might have been infected
with a potentially deadly disease, I think must have been immensely frightening.
The most important thing is having the right processes, having people trained and ready
and drilled.
And that's really been the core of the New York City emergency preparedness efforts.
Not only making sure that we have adequate access to antibiotics or vaccines,
but that we have protocols, procedures and that we drill. We do practice.
We know that there is a Puerto Rican gay male couple, Benjamin and Christine,
who lived on the second floor of 103 Orchard Street during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
By the late 1980s, early 1990s, they were both living with AIDS and eventually passed away.
Beyond that, we don't know very much about their lives specifically yet
and we hope to uncover more as part of the research we're doing over the next few months.
Were they're ostracized by their neighbours?
Were they blamed for having the disease because of who they were?
What kinds of access to medical care did they have?
We, despite progress that's been made and getting people health insurance, still have
millions of people who lack health insurance altogether.
People who are undocumented and therefore live in the shadows of our society
– these are people who I worry about might get sick with something that was lethal, contagious
and be afraid to seek care.
One of the things I think we'll explore in detail is the role that each of these different
illnesses played in 'othering'
– that these individuals to some extent are responsible themselves
for introducing this contagion
because they're inherently predisposed to these conditions.
It's important for people to see what living conditions were for many new immigrants
when they came to the United States.
And the ways in which we have worked to ensure that people now have better living conditions
which, after all, is the foundation of good health.